Why Judith Miller Can't Catch a Break

By: Greg Mitchell The top-down defense of Judith Miller at The New York Times sometimes reminds me of the classic song, ?Every Time I Go to Town (The Boys Keep Kicking My Dog Around)," recorded by Bob Dylan nearly 40 years ago in the basement at Big Pink, and never released. Now, two days after New York Times executive editor Bill Keller denounced ?armchair critics? who have knocked the paper for its weak coverage of the Miller case -- and a day after complaining about being ?nibbled at by the blogs? -- it turns out that some of the harshest criticism comes not from the global Web village but from within his own ranks.

Leaks from inside the Times to this effect, some reported by E&P, have emerged for months, but Thursday morning National Public Radio's David Folkenflik produced a segment citing three unnamed Timespeople voicing complaints. At the same time, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post -- a rival newspaper -- came out with a column based largely on interviews with nearly a dozen anonymous Times staffers. While he reports a very mixed in-house opinion, he declares that ?anguish? among staffers over the paper's handling of the Miller saga ?has mounted in recent days, much to the consternation of its top executives.?

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And the column contains this money shot: ?Some said the newsroom is more demoralized now than during the 2003 debacle over Jayson Blair's serial fabrications, because top editors were deceived by Blair but in this case have embraced Miller's handling of the controversy and level of disclosure.?

Adam Clymer, the former Times political editor and chief Washington correspondent, explained: "A lot of the reporters have really been wondering and doubting their editors. It wasn't that they knew the defense of Judy was wrong, but they didn't have a sense of what was being defended. ... People all over the paper think the Times should have been covering the story harder."

Clymer also pointed out that some at the paper still resented Miller for her grievously flawed reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of destruction, especially those who tried to dissuade her at the time.

This is a critical point. Defenders of Miller's actions in the Plame affair have long complained that she has unfairly suffered in the court of media opinion because she is tainted by her many errors on WMDs -- which, after all, helped ease the path to a catastrophic war. This defense is absurd, of course, since the entire Plame case stems directly from the bogus WMD claims and the administration's attempt to tar those brave souls (Miller not among them) who later raised questions.

Rarely mentioned is that Keller's defense of Miller pre-dates the Plame case. The Times not only apparently failed to punish her for her WMD reporting (which did, indeed, prove far more deadly than Jayson Blair's illusions), it went out of its way to shield her from embarrassment. Keller was not top editor at the Times before the Iraq invasion, but as a columnist for the paper called himself a "hawk" on the war. He later said he supported the invasion "mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a real opportunity."

The Times' efforts on Miller's behalf reached preposterous proportions in its controversial May 26, 2004 editors' note, which at long last admitted flaws in the paper's pre-war coverage of Iraq WMDs (while failing to apologize to readers). It briefly described six particular articles that had wrongly bolstered the notion of WMDs, without mentioning the names of any of the reporters involved. E&P was first to reveal that Judith Miller had a hand in four of the six stories.

Most damaging among these articles was the Sept. 8, 2002, front-pager that made the case for Saddam's interest in the ?aluminum tubes? and raised the specter of a mushroom cloud over America. The Times later dryly admitted, "The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes," adding, "The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article." Vice President Cheney, in fact, specifically cited the Times story in stating, later that day, that he knew with "absolute certainty" that Saddam was buying the tubes to build nuclear weapons.

"It looks as if we, along with the Administration, were taken in,? the Times' editors' note admitted, without pointing to the prime media conduit/sap for the Scooter Libbys who drove the rush to war: Judith Miller.

As E&P columnist William E. Jackson, Jr. pointed out in response, ?Strikingly absent from the editors' note is any flat-out admission that the Times as an institution allowed the line to become indistinct between the Bush Administration's claims and the newspaper's own reporting. There is no admission that the nation's leading print outlet bears some responsibility for the march to war.?

And yet, they wonder why so many will not give the newspaper, and Judy Miller, a mulligan today.